1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to logistics systems and methods. In particular, the present invention relates to logistics systems and methods for the transportation of goods.
2. Description of the Related Art
There are inefficiencies in the shipments of goods and a lack of good strategic planning. In a typical situation, a large shipper and its customers may all have sophisticated Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system software. The shipper's ERP system fine tunes production assets to manage customer orders, production overflows, etc., so that they are continuously producing and providing products to their customers. When a customer wants to order a product, its system issues a purchase order document that must be forwarded to the shipper and input into its ERP system. The shipper's ERP system prepares the purchase order as a customer order, obtains and allocates the necessary inventory, schedules the order, arranges for manufacturing units to manufacture the ordered product and then gets the product ready for shipment. After this is done, the shipper calls a carrier to pick up the shipment and an invoice is sent to the customer after the shipment has been picked up by the carrier.
From the perspective of the ordering customer's system, the purchase order remains open and unpaid until the ordered product(s) is physically received from a carrier and is entered into the ordering customer's system. After the carrier accepts a shipment (i.e., gives a receipt) and before the shipment arrives at the shipper's customer and is entered into their ERP system, it cannot be tracked by the ERP system software of either the shipper or the shipper's customer. If a shipment is not received when expected, the customer and shipper must do a manual trace through phone calls or the like to determine the status of the shipment.
The carrier is an owner of transport assets and services. For instance, the railroad carriers have trains, track, etc., and motor carriers have trucks and drivers. The carriers carry out a great deal of logistics since their profits depend greatly on how well they optimize the utilization of their transport assets and services. A primary goal of the carriers is to load their ships, trucks, etc., as full as possible. They typically use their own internal business and logistics applications, frequently Logistics Management Systems (LMS) which are independent of the shipper and the shipper's customer, to decide how to best accomplish their shipments.
Unfortunately, the applications systems of the shipper and the carrier do not communicate with each other. Thus, circumstances may arise where the shipment can be accomplished more efficiently and less expensively by, for example, shipping one day earlier or later or consolidated with the shipment of another shipper, but the shipper nevertheless requests the shipment when it does because it is not aware that such circumstances exist and does not cooperate with other shippers.
Furthermore, the carriers are fragmented into various modes of transport (truck, rail, marine, air). These modes make the supplier's logistics of shipping products more difficult because there is no integration between modes. It also results in a large amount of administrative and financial transactions related to the shipments. The traditional transactions were generically illustrated in FIG. 23 of the provisional application and illustrated with specific reference to the truck mode in FIG. 32 of the provisional application. Even third-party logistics service providers typically only accommodate one or two modes. For example, there are chemical tanker brokers (handling chemical tankers, product tankers, oil tankers), third party trucking companies (handling package trucks and some bulk trucks), freight forwarders (handling containers and some trucks/warehouses) and terminals service providers (handling terminals, warehouses, and some transport capability).
These problems are especially acute when dealing with ocean transport and with some products, such as chemicals, because of the special handling and regulatory requirements. See, for example, the chemical transport terminal illustrated in FIG. 31 of the provisional application. Ocean Transport Intermediary (OTI) licenses are necessary for tankers and the various restrictions regarding, for example, ownership interests in the vessels and the transported goods causes such carriers to operate more independently from the shippers than in other transport modes and without the benefit of licensed third-party intermediaries with substantial logistics capabilities.